Monthly Archives: March 2015

I know I’ve been super lax about posting here. I will try to be better. But if you find that you can’t do without me in between posts, you can now listen to me!

I’ve talked in the past about the Skein After Skein podcast hosted by my friends Eve and Michele. They had basically stopped recording after Eve had her twins last year. Understandably, with two babies and a full time job, podcasting was something that fell away for Eve. I really missed listening to the two of the them, but also kind of had the podcast bug. I have been listening to a ridiculous amount of podcasts at work recently. So Michele and I decided to start up a new podcast.

And it is now available! You can find us at www.skeinenable.com. We are also on iTunes, so you can subscribe to us there. I can find it on my phone, but when I look on my computer, I can’t find it. You can search for Skein Enable and we will come up. We have one episode up right now, but a second one should come out any time now.

We basically just talk about knitting, crafting and a bunch of other topics. Come and join us! I always feel obligated to say that we are not always family friendly, so this might not be the best thing for playing in the car with your kids.

You guys know how I love a good Knit-A-Long, right? I’ve been keeping myself busy with the KAL going on in the Holla Knits group on Ravelry. I own one issue of this online magazine and have bought a few individual patterns. The group is doing a KAL that lasts three months. If you finish any of the Holla Knits pattern, you will be gifted another Holla Knits pattern or a pattern by one of their contributors! The only thing better than knitting is getting free stuff for knitting.

Mods: None. In hindsight I would have tried to figure out how to do short rows for the backside. To get the shorts up over my butt, I had to make them kind of high in the front. They are total Ed Grimley shorts, at least in the front.

(Panty liiinnneees!)

I didn’t put on belt loops because I don’t think I’ll ever wear them with a belt or even with a shirt tucked in.

The pictures are taken at the top of Runyon Canyon. I felt comfortable enough wearing them as hiking shorts, but I need to work on confidence to wear them out as dress shorts. You know, dress shorts.

Love it! After I knit the waistband, I folded it over and knit the live stitches with the cast on stitches, almost all the way around, just leaving a gap to put the elastic in. This is so I didn’t have to sew it all down later. I knit the rest of it according to the pattern.

This was a lot of knitting! There were a lot of stitches in each round and it was mostly mindless stockinette. Well, where the pockets are you have to knit back and forth so not as pleasurable as just knitting in the round endlessly. I love how the Daisy stitch sections look. My hands weren’t totally pleased with that stitch, but it was worth it. There were a lot of K3tog,yo, k3tog in the same three stitches. The pockets are about 4″ deep. Deep enough to hold a phone, but don’t know if they would make the skirt droop down. Pockets!

When I first tried it on, with just a loose t-shirt, it looked pretty silly. I felt like a costume skirt. But after blocking and trying it on with a different top, my mind was totally changed! I love it! I don’t think the blocking really did it, I assume it was changing out of the pajama shirt that made the difference. Well it might be less poufy after blocking.

I had to snug up the elastic quite a bit. There were elastic waistbands in both of these projects. I started with elastic about the size of my waist. And then I kept tightening it up by an inch (safety pinned together), and then another inch, etc. until it was about four inches less than my waist.

Crazy picture!:

And the icing on the cake? I got to pick two patterns. I “won” the Inspired Sweater by Boadicea Binnerts and the Kitefish Shawlette by Leah Coccari-Swift. Those were both patterns that I have loved since they came out a long time ago, so now maybe I will actually make them!

I could potentially do one more project for the KAL, but I am probably done. I do have the pattern for the Stoney Brook Top… But I’m currently working on a different fingering weight yarn, so unlikely.